Yukinori Yanagi
Yukinori Yanagi is a Japanese contemporary artist.
Education and Career
He earned a bachelor's and master's of fine arts, both from Musashino Art University.From 1986, Yanagi began to exhibit artwork such as those using ants and soil balls that represent dung beetle rolled balls, addressing the issues of “movement” from the perspective of an outsider of the art world’s system. Yanagi had an opportunity to exhibit works at the Hillside Gallery in Daikanyama, where he showed various pieces including a smoke performance piece I Feel Yellow. Yanagi was awarded the Excellence Award in Art Document from the Tochigi Prefectural Art Museum of Fine Arts in 1987.
Yanagi moved to United States after he received a scholarship from the Sculpture Department of the Graduate School of Yale University School of Art in 1988, where he studied under Vito Acconci, Frank Gehry, among others. His graduating piece, Wandering Mickey earned him an excellence award. After graduating from Yale, Yanagi held solo exhibitions first in New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in 1990, and in 1991 in Los Angeles’s LACE. It was then that his work, The World Flag Ant Farm was exhibited. This piece features national flags made of sand being destroyed by ants moving through them. This work was featured on the cover of Art in America, one of the leading art magazines in the States. Yanagi moved to New York where he started to work internationally.
The World Flag Ant Farm was awarded the Aperto Award at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. He created an art project on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay’s former prison island, in 1996.
Yanagi’s “Hinomaru-series” works feature Japanese pop culture icons and attracted attention as it touched on the issues of Japanese social, political and economic ideologies. It has been influential on artists of the same generation including Takashi Murakami and Masato Nakamura. “Hinomaru-series” includes Hi-no-maru 1/36, shown at New York’s Storefront For Art and Architecture just before the Gulf War, Self-Defence at Hillside Gallery in 1990, using Tamiya’s toy military tanks and Banzai Corner at Hosomi Gallery in 1990, with hundreds of Ultraman and Ultra Seven superhero figurines.
In 1992, with the aid of the Asian Cultural Council, Yanagi was invited to the PS1 Studio Program in New York. In the same year, he exhibited Hi-no-maru Illumination, a huge Japanese flag in neon at the Fuji TV Gallery. He was also invited to open a solo exhibition at the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, which had only newly opened in 1992. His stay on Naoshima inspired an idea for a new work on an island in the Seto Inland Sea. After three years of looking for an appropriate site, he came across Okayama Prefecture’s Inujima, which is dotted with copper refinery ruins dating back to the Meiji Period, and the idea of the Inujima Project was formed. He began traveling between New York and Inujima.
In 1995, Yanagi’s vision for the revitalization of the whole island of Inujima by turning the copper refinery ruins into art and using renewable energy, was realized with the support from Benesse Corporation’s CEO at the time, Soichiro Fukutake. In 2008, Inujima Art Project’s “Seirensho”, which combines features of the house of Yukio Mishima and Heritage Industrial Modernization, opened and is now known as Inujima Seirensho Art Museum. The project took a total of 13 years to complete. It became a forerunner of Art Setouchi, the art projects on the islands in the Seto Inland Sea.
In 2000, Yanagi became the first foreign artist living in New York to be invited to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial, alongside Cai Guo-Qiang. Yanagi presented his “Study For American Art” series, which included his Three Flags, Jasper Jones inspired piece.
In the same year, after the first retrospective exhibition at Hiroshima City Contemporary Art Museum, and just before the September 11 attacks, Yanagi closed his studios in New York and San Francisco, moving to a self-designed studio situated on the north face of the mountains facing the Genkai Sea, in Itoshima City, Fukuoka prefecture. The solar energy system used there is passed on to the Inujima Project.
In 2005, after returning to Japan, Yanagi began working as an associate professor in the Faculty of Art at Hiroshima City University. He started contemporary art and theory major in the faculty of Arts and launched the Hiroshima Art Project, utilizing unused facilities due to the exposure to radiation, as sites to exhibit artworks.
The Inujima Art House Project during the 1st Art Setouchi in 2010, featured three installations in the Inujima village, by Yanagi in collaboration with architect Kazuyo Sejima. After the completion of the Inujima Project, he took on the challenge of transforming an old junior high school on the remote island of Momoshima Island, Onomichi City, Hiroshima prefecture, to make ART BASE MOMOSHIMA, and work in the Onomichi Channel area.
In 2016, Yanagi’s large-scale solo exhibition at Yokohama’s BankART1929 explored the 30 years of his artwork and took up the whole museum. He unveiled Project God-zilla, a work about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011. This exhibition was selected as the best exhibition of the year from both the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper and the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.
Notable artwork and Public collections
Banzai Corner - Fukutake Foundation, JapanHinomaru Illumination - The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan
Hinomaru Container - Yamato Tumulus Type - Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Chrysanthemum Carpet - National Gallery of Australia
Article 9
The Forbidden Box - The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, USA
Pacific - The Ant Farm Project - - Tate Modern, United Kingdom
Dollar Pyramid - Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Inujima Seirensho Art Museum - Fukutake Foundation, Japan
Icarus Cell
Project God-zilla - Landscape with an Eye -